1. Field
The present invention relates to the generation of user help information for software applications. In particular, it relates to generating user help information for customized user interfaces.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modularization and componentization of software applications has led to increased configurability at all levels of software architectures. The ability to plug-in required software components to tailor a solution to a particular use case or user provides highly configurable loosely coupled solutions.
One aspect of software that is becoming increasingly customizable is the user interface. Customized user interface generators provide user interfaces including only the features and facilities required by a particular user or class of users to undertake predetermined user tasks as part of a user role. User interface features not required by those tasks need not be included within the customized user interface. The generation of such customized user interfaces can occur dynamically and automatically based on definitions of user tasks and user interface components, updating as those definitions change.
Such dynamic and customized user interfaces can lead to frequent changes in the content and layout of the user interface and variability of the functions and features of user interface components. Thus, users will typically call upon help information such as may be provided with user interfaces of software applications to guide the user through their use of elements of the user interface. It is a technical challenge to provide appropriate help information for users of customized user interfaces including only information relevant to the user interface rendered for presentation to the user. Help information for user interface components not rendered to the user may preferably be excluded from help information.
This challenge can be addressed by generating custom help information for each customized user interface. However, such custom generation of help information is time consuming and expensive, especially where the user interface updates frequently or where there are associated translation requirements for help information in multiple languages.
An alternative approach to addressing this challenge is to render all help information sufficiently generic such that a change to the customized user interface does not render the help information invalid. However, such an approach inevitably leads to help information relating to irrelevant user interface components or features being present, and a level of generality of the help information may be so high as to leave the help information difficult to navigate and read or to render the help information generally unusable.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide help information for customized user interfaces without the drawbacks described above.